by steve higgs
Despite the lack of preparation, it looked like they were in luck. They watched everyone else leave, both men finding a dark corner in which to wait and observe. The outline plan had been to follow him home because the small amount of research they did get time for revealed he lived just a quarter mile from the café. They guessed he would walk, not drive, though they were yet to determine if their assumptions were accurate.
Regardless, before they could find out, the old man from earlier appeared with his dog and now he was inside with their target. Worse yet, it didn’t look like they were leaving any time soon.
Francis was just thinking about calling Eugene when his phone began to vibrate. He spoke a single word as the call connected. ‘Go.’ He and Eugene were both ex special forces and favoured brevity in their exchanges.
‘Is something happening?’ Eugene asked. ‘The lights in the back rooms started to come back on. I think I can see an old man in there with him now.’ Eugene was inappropriately dressed for night ops and for the weather. His jacket was going to ruin if it got much wetter and his expensive Italian loafers were soaked right through already. He couldn’t moan about it because Francis would scoff at his need to dress smartly.
Francis replied, ‘That’s the old man he was talking to earlier. I remember the giant dog.’
‘Any idea who he is?’ asked Eugene.
Francis pulled a face at his phone. ‘How on Earth would I know who it is? I watched them go through to the back rooms. If they are in an office, can you see what they are doing?’
Eugene grunted, ‘Sitting in front of a computer. This feels like a bust.’
‘He won’t like that,’ muttered Francis, referring to the earl’s lack of patience.
‘Tough,’ growled Eugene as his stomach rumbled. ‘We can’t work miracles and I’m not rushing this and getting caught just because the earl wants it done fast. Besides, I’m getting hungry.’
‘Fish ‘n’ chips?’ suggested Francis thinking some dinner sounded like a good idea.
‘You’d better call him and let him know,’ Eugene insisted, quite certain he didn’t want to be the one to break the news.
Francis curled his lip. ‘Why me? Why don’t you call him?’
‘Because he likes you.’
‘He doesn’t even remember my name,’ Francis protested.
Eugene chuckled. ‘He doesn’t remember anyone’s name. You call him and I’ll buy dinner.’
Francis took a second to weigh up the proposed bargain. ‘All right, but I want mushy peas too.’
Dodgy Accounting
In the back office of the Clanger Café, Albert sat in front of the computer while Victor leaned over him to navigate to the accounts.
‘Kate switched the firm across to a software platform that she said was easier to follow and would do a lot of the work for us. It caused untold drama with April because she’s been here since before computers existed. I don’t know when the previous owners shifted her onto a computer, but she was using a spreadsheet she’d created herself. I don’t think anyone else could hope to understand it which she thought made her irreplaceable. It really put her nose out of joint when Joel announced Kate was taking over the bookkeeping and she made so much noise about her rights being unfairly undermined that Joel relented and had Kate show April how the system worked.’
‘That’s how she came to take over today the moment Kate was taken away and how she would know if someone were fiddling the books,’ Albert concluded.
Victor nodded as he pulled up a second chair to sit next to the old man. ‘That’s right.’
Questions were forming a queue in his head already, but Albert asked the most obvious one, ‘If Kate is the accountant, how come she was working behind the counter and cleaning away plates?’
Victor flipped his eyebrows. ‘This is a small, family business, everyone switches between tasks and mucks in to help out. In fact, most of the people working here are related. Even April – one of our youngest, Shannon, is her sister’s granddaughter.’
Albert pursed his lips and looked at the screen. ‘Have you spotted any accounting anomalies that might make you believe April is right?’
‘Me?’ Victor flared his eyes. ‘Goodness, no. I have no idea what all those lines of numbers mean. I’m just a guy that is good with pastry. Shall I leave you with it? I need to start cleaning up.’
Albert’s reply came without him needing to think. ‘Sure.’ His attention was already on the screen. A murder, possible embezzlement: he wouldn’t have to worry about finding his book boring or the people in the pub rowdy.’ He heard Victor ask something about a cup of tea and couldn’t say afterwards, what answer he might have given - the pull of the mystery was too great.
Rex sniffed around the office. It was a small space, roughly ten feet by ten feet with filing cabinets along one wall and shelves covered in box folders along another. He wanted to shake his fur properly, but when he lined himself up to do so, his human placed a hand on his head and begged that he lie down. He complied with a loud harrumph, making his feelings clear.
Above him, his human silently scanned along the rows of numbers.
Disappointment
‘Why are you not on the return leg?’ he demanded to know.
Francis sighed and bit his lip. He’d worked for worse employers, far worse now that he gave it some thought, but the earl had never worked a day in his life. He didn’t clean, he didn’t cook, he didn’t lift a finger unless it was to pluck a morsel of food from a dish. He had no concept of what doing anything took with regard to effort, investment of time, and to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the task, luck. He simply expected things to happen because he wanted it to be done.
‘We have been unable, at this time, to acquire the target,’ Francis attempted to explain.
‘Acquire the target?’ repeated Earl Bacon, the words dripping from his mouth as if something unpleasant had found its way in there. ‘That sounds like an excuse to me. I don’t like excuses. I want that chef brought here and I want you to make sure you have the right one this time. I don’t like being disappointed and you are disappointing me.’ He already knew that Maddie Hayes was a made-up name and had recovered from the shock. That Joel Clement would lie to him was unfathomable, and he hated that he was now relying on his two muscular idiots to bring him the person they claimed was the one he truly wanted.
Francis exhaled slowly through his nose and fantasised about squeezing his employer’s neck. The only good thing about his employer was that he was predictable. Well, that and he paid well. The earl had so much money it no longer had any meaning to him. He was utterly bonkers with all his talk of the world ending. He planned to live in an underground bunker and gorge himself to death on the world’s finest food. He could buy whatever he wanted, but many of the things on his list of required foods were not the sort of thing a person could easily buy in bulk quantities. Also, getting them to his bunker, which he wanted as few people as possible to know the location of, meant secretive movements and that was why he employed Eugene and Francis. They were to arrange to obtain certain commodities, and people. The earl had a list of people he wanted to work in his kitchen. They were captives, of course, not employees, but the earl was crazy enough to believe he was saving them. On top of cooks and chefs and such, there were people to look after livestock, farmers to grow his plants, which was a highly specialised thing because it was all underground. He had three men just for mushrooms!
The saved, as the earl liked to call them, were all prisoners, but they were well-treated provided they accepted escape was impossible. Poor Joel Clement was the first person they’d had to kill for their new employer, but not the first person either man had killed. The list was well into double figures for each of them. Some were legitimate kills from their days in the special forces, but there had been an equal number since.
Francis quickly snaffled a chip from his bag before responding to his boss. ‘We are waiting for an opportunity to take the target cl
eanly, Your Earlness. I anticipate this will occur very soon, certainly in the next twenty-four hours.’
‘You had just better make sure it does,’ snapped the earl. He knew how to handle men like Francis. He could trace his family’s lineage all the way back to King Henry the seventh’s court. His family had been lording it over lesser men for centuries. The general populace were layabouts and brigands the lot of them and could only be controlled with a firm hand.
Eugene and Francis had decided they quite fancied a couple of pints and an early night. The earl had them working all kinds of hours, but away from his constant demands they could claim it took longer than expected to safely obtain Victor Harris and who could possibly prove otherwise? They would come back in the morning and maybe intercept him on his way to work.
Stuffing another vinegar-soaked chip into his mouth, Francis repeated his promise to return within twenty-four hours and ended the call.
Bookkeeping
Albert was no accountant, but he knew his way around a set of books. It was one of the things he’d taught himself as part of his job. He wanted to know as much as he could and believed his determination to have a rounded education was what helped him rise through the ranks of the Kent Police while others floundered. Money was so often the motivation behind the murders he investigated, that having a basic knowledge of cashflow, profit and loss, and other regular accounting statements helped him zero in on what might be going on.
Not so this time.
If there were false entries here, or numbers that failed to tally, he wasn’t seeing them. Checking over his shoulder to listen for Victor, he reached into his jacket to produce his phone.
‘Hi, dad?’ said his daughter, Selina, when she answered.
Albert tried to split his phone calls between his children, wanting to limit the number of times he asked them to do things for him so he wouldn’t seem like he was always snooping into someone’s business. Of course, he knew his kids talked to each other, so his attempts at subterfuge were largely pointless, but he did it anyway.
‘Hello, Selina, how are you and how are my grandchildren?’ he asked to get the conversation started.
‘Everyone is sick, actually. Except me, that is. Some kind of tummy bug. The kids started exploding from both ends this morning and now their father is too. I’ve had to take the day off to deal with them all.’
This was not the news Albert wanted to hear. Obviously, he never wanted to hear that his grandchildren were ill, but he wanted Selina to be in work and able to use her contacts to get the books checked over. At home, and with a sick family, she wasn’t in a position to help and he wouldn’t ask.
‘That’s terrible,’ he said, secretly wishing he’d called Randall now because he didn’t have children or a wife. ‘Do you feel okay?’
Selina sighed. ‘I could do without this, but yes, I’m fine. I don’t get sick.’
Albert remembered how rare it was for her to ever be ill as a child. ‘No. No, you don’t, do you? Well, I guess I had better let you get back to it then. Sounds like you have your hands full.’
‘No, Dad,’ Selina protested. ‘I could do with a break from them. You called me so you must have time to chat. Where are you tonight? Still in Biggleswade?’ His daughter wanted to chat and he could hardly push her away to call one of his other children who might be able to help instead, but as he regaled her with how his clanger class had gone and how tasty the treat had been, he spotted a line on the screen that didn’t tally. He’d needed longer to scrutinise the accounts, that was all. Now that he’d seen the first one, he saw a second too. They were small numbers, not on the main profit and loss statement, but on the daily takings tallies. He certainly wouldn’t have spotted them if he hadn’t been looking, but April had.
They were small numbers, twenty pounds one day, ten pounds on another but not two days in a row. He continued to look back at the sheets. Each monthly tally showed a set of figures that matched, and the monthly profit and loss statement hid the missing money, but the daily tallies, where the goods sold ought to match the money taken for them, had holes in. One could put them down to the person on the till accidentally handing over the wrong change, but there were too many instances for that, and it was all exact numbers.
Now that he’d identified what looked like petty theft - someone taking notes from the till - Albert had to consider what it meant and if it had anything to do with Joel Clement’s murder.
‘Dad!’
Snapped back to reality, Albert realised Selina had been talking and probably asking him questions, but he hadn’t spoken in over a minute. ‘Sorry, sweetheart, I zoned out there for a moment, didn’t I? I should probably get an early night. All the excitement recently has left me feeling tired.’ He faked a yawn, making it audible as part of his act.
Selina sounded a little worried when she replied, ‘Are you sure you’re all right, Dad? You can come home any time you want. I will come and get you. Or one of the boys will. It’s no bother.’
They were still trying to get him to cancel or cut short his trip. They all worried for no good reason. It made him want to fast forward their lives so they could be nearly eighty too. Maybe then they would see that scoring a few years didn’t make a person decrepit.
‘I’m fine, sweetheart,’ he assured her, believing wholeheartedly that it was true. ‘I’m having fun and so is Rex. You’ve nothing to worry about.’
‘Dad, you keep getting mixed up in murder cases. Randall got hurt in Bakewell and I had to come there with Gary to help you out.’
Albert chuckled, ‘Yeah. That was a lot of fun, wasn’t it?’
‘No, Dad. It was dangerous. You could have been hurt. Randall was hurt.’
‘It all ended well enough,’ Albert grumbled, beginning to feel a little put upon.
Relenting, Selina said, ‘Okay, Dad. Look I’ve got to go. I can hear one of the kids moving about upstairs which probably means they are about to throw up again. Just take care of yourself, okay?’
‘Of course, love.’ The call ended, but he’d been looking at the lines of numbers the whole time and there was no doubt someone had been taking money.
He pulled open the drawer in the desk to see if there was anything in it of interest. A notebook with some annotations would be nice, he thought as he leafed through the clutter. Perhaps he needed to speak with April. She didn’t portray herself as someone a person might wish to interview, but she clearly thought she knew something, and he needed to know what it was.
Victor reappeared in the doorway. He was perspiring slightly from the effort of getting the café cleaned to an acceptable standard as swiftly as possible. ‘Find anything?’ he asked.
Albert took a few moments to point out the small discrepancies, indicating each line and figure with a finger and then hypothesising about the notes being taken from the till as one way in which the money might have gone missing.
Victor skewed his face to the side in thought. ‘Kate would have noticed that, wouldn’t she?’ he asked it as a question, but Albert thought the man already knew the answer.
‘They would have stood out,’ he replied quietly. ‘Any accountant would have seen them.’
Victor was shaking his head, accepting what he could see but refusing to believe it anyway. ‘There’s no way Kate was stealing from the business. No way. Just like there’s no way she killed Joel.’
‘Well then. I guess we should ask her about it.’
‘We can do that?’ asked Victor. ‘I didn’t think they would let me near her.’
Albert tipped his chair back. ‘At the station? No, they won’t. Not without very good reason. They will let her make a phone call though. We just have to get a message to her, so she calls us.’ In his head, Albert was thinking about his two sons and wondering which he could use to get a message to Kate Harris. He had a short list of questions he wanted answers to and the only way to get them, unless DS Craig felt like sharing, which he highly doubted, was to have Randall or Gary go through a back d
oor.
‘Can we do that now?’ asked Victor.
Albert glanced at the clock on the computer and shook his head. ‘Unlikely, I will need to set that up.’ In truth, Victor could go to the station and have a message to call him passed on. They would probably do it, but Albert wanted to be involved and this way was more likely to yield a result.
Hanging his head, Victor released a breath as if he’d been holding it. ‘Poor Kate.’ At the sound of his human’s name, Hans looked up, making eye contact with Victor. ‘And what am I going to do with you?’ he asked the dog.
Hans tilted his head to the side, wondering what he was being asked.
Rex saw a great opportunity to get his own back for some of the snarky dog’s comments, but rubbing in that his human was gone and might not come back was too cruel for him to consider, so he moved to get to his own human for a head rub and accidentally on purpose knocked the dachshund over as he barged past.
‘Hey, watch it!’ growled Hans.
‘You can’t take him home with you?’ enquired Albert, thinking that to be the obvious solution.
Victor rubbed his chin. ‘I’m not sure how that would be received; my wife is not a fan of dogs in general and the kids will get overexcited and then want one of their own.’ Scratching his chin, he concluded. ‘I guess it will be okay for a few nights. Do you think he is housebroken?’
‘Housebroken!’ exclaimed Hans, righteous indignation making him want to bite the human’s ankle.
Rex sniggered, which just made things worse.
‘I suppose it’s a bit late to be coming up with another plan,’ Victor sighed. At his feet, the two dogs were growling at each other.
‘Your mother likes to hang out with three-legged dogs at the docks,’ snarled Hans.
‘Your mother drives a motorised doggie wheelchair!’ snapped Rex. ‘She’s not crippled, she just likes that she can go to the park and reverse it around to all the dogs one at a time.’